After reading the book Photoshop Lab Color- Dan Margulis, I’ve gotten the urge to revisit some of the images that I’ve posted to see what can be done to give them a little kick.

To my eye, this image is a perfect candidate for Lab maipulation — there’s no obvious color cast, and close together colors could use a push apart. While I’m at it, a little bit of luminance channel sharpening can be put in.

Now to be fair, my normal processing uses a kick of L channel sharpening, but nothing that mucks with the colors.

Boosted/remixed:

vs the original:

Basically, this is boosting the slope of the a and b channels, a basic curve on the L channel, and the sharpening. I think the result is a lot better, and mostly true to the original look of the piece of rusty metal.